My Tumblr Dashboard this evening had a post about that weird Benny Lava youtube video, which reminded me of this totally weird moment I had late night at a hostel in Osaka. I was one of 3 white people in the room, plus maybe 5 or 6 nihonjin? I was making a joke involving a couple different voices, and afterwards someone asked me to do a black accent, which is weird because maybe with enough cultural distance it’s like an innocent enough question but of course to a white American kid that’s like whoa. I think I said something like, “Hello, I am a person of African American descent.” But then this white girl from LA was like Oh I got this and youtube’d that hide ya wife hide ya kids video, talking about how hilarious it was because they talk all funny in it. AWKWARDDDDD. All I could think of to say was “America still has a lot of culture about making fun of black people.”

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“My dad … came to America in 1985 and has spent the last 25 years realizing that discrimination in America exists just like it does everywhere else in the world but there are laws against it here so it has to be really subtle. my dad wants to leave America and move to Europe as soon as he can, where he hopes that people there will at least drop the pretense of being post-race.” -David Shapiro